


Hailey's TV

by jillcalt



Category: No Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-25
Updated: 2014-11-25
Packaged: 2018-02-27 00:49:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2672702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jillcalt/pseuds/jillcalt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At this point, I don’t know if we’ll find her, but I still have one last ray of hope. Even when you start to lose faith, you pray for the best, and try to go on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hailey's TV

“Hailey O’ Henry has now been missing for six days. No sightings have been reported,” the news anchor reports about my little sister, “she is short, about six years of age, with curly blonde hair and green eyes.” Tomorrow is exactly one week since she has gone missing.

At this point, I don’t know if we’ll find her, but I still have one last ray of hope. Even when you start to lose faith, you pray for the best, and try to go on. I gathered food for breakfast early this morning. We are suffering with a dearth of money, and made pancakes, but they are my Mom’s favorite. My mother is taking it hardest, so I decided to wake her up once the food is ready. She mostly played with her food, but I let it slide this time. At least she got out of bed.

“I’m going to go for a walk,” she says as she stands from the table, “to get fresh air.” She slowly walks out of the house and down the street. This is really taking a toll on her, and I feel horribly about it.

I finish my plate, wash the dishes, and listen to the repeating news anchor. I skim through the “Help Wanted” advertisements. I already have two jobs to support this house that I call the “Shoebox”, my mother, my sister, and myself; not including my mother’s boyfriend. He’s a leech of a person, in my opinion. All he does, is eat our food (that is already hard to come by nowadays), sleep all day, and take up space.

With the news repeating about Hailey daily, luckily some kind donors sent checks or money. I have to keep ahold of what we do receive because Mom or her boyfriend wouldn’t spend it the right ways; that’s the main problem.

Hailey has to be on this tiny, corrupt world somewhere. The States have now been brought down to thirty, so she couldn’t have gone far. No one really knows what happened to the other countries and continents. They say the other places were invaded and destroyed. Now there are guards everywhere, even along every town border. Our town, Lynn, that was named after the sixtieth dictator (Aphrodite Lynn). She was the one who got this town put into the depression it is now. There’s no money, no running water, and no- anything. 

Mom’s boyfriend emerges from the living room where he slept on the couch. “They’ll never find her. She was annoying anyways.” He sits, snatching the newspaper from my previous spot.

“Don’t say that! She’s my sister!” I spit back, through gritted teeth. He aggravates me so much.

“She could be in any of the thirty counties,” he shrugs, “it’s not a big country anymore, but anything could’ve happened.”

I roll my eyes and put the last of the plates away. Everything in this house is falling off at it’s hinges, literally. Why do we have to live in the poorest county? I can’t wait to get out of here. I turn the small television on just for the background noise.

A few hours later, I leave the house to take a walk, and Mom is leaving for work. She walks along the dirt path beside me. “Do you really think she’s out there somewhere?” I ask to break the silence.

“I’d like to think that way, but I honestly don’t know anymore,” she responds, “at this point, I don’t really know.”

We eventually make it to the center of town and she heads into the boutique where she works. I turn into a television store that seems to be abandoned at the first glance. The televisions in the windows still flash different TV sitcoms and news channels. I greet the shop owner behind the counter and slowly walk down the aisles of televisions. Most of the televisions are from the 1960’s, speaker off the the left, buttons to the right, and antennas protruding from the top. They’ve got to be almost one-hundred-twenty years old, considering it is now 2080.

“The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh” flashes on one of the screens. “Up, down, up. When I up, down, touch the ground it puts me in the mood. Up, down, touch the ground in the mood for food,” Winnie the Pooh sings.

We need to find Hailey soon. Anything could’ve happened to her by now. I really do hope she’s okay. She must be here somewhere.

The next television that seems to be a bit more “modern”, probably from the early 1980’s. It doesn’t appear as bulky as the last. “Alice in Wonderland” is playing; it’s one of my favorite movies. I stand and watch as Alice chases the white bunny. Someone familiar follows behind her…

“Is that.. that’s Hailey!” I think to myself. Alice falls into the rabbit hole and Hailey jumps in right after. "Hailey!" I scream.

I think someone changes the channel because it changes to another film that I've never seen. It goes black for a second then popular children's' characters appear; "The Muppets". Along with Kermit and Miss. Piggy is, of course, my sister. I run over and grab her arm. The puppets appear unaffected and go on with their routine. "We have to leave, Hailey, c'mon."

"I don't want to," she mumbles, tugging her arm away. "It's better here."

"No it isn't, now let's go." I'm really getting tired of this. Suddenly, she bolts away. There's a loud popping noise and everything shuts down, turning black. Hailey is no where to be found.

I remember when I persuaded my mother to buy a night-light for my room to keep the spiders away at night. She looked at me as if I were crazy. I would try to tell about how the spiders ran up my legs and under the blankets. People looked at me while I rambled about the spiders, the ghosts, and the monsters, as if I had three heads. I hoped they would understand or know what I was talking about.

I've always been terrified of the dark. It shows things I see, but really aren't there. It shows illusions, for example, it shows people with warped faces and distorted bodies that terrify me. It has taunted me every night.

I can feel the spiders crawling up my legs and all over my body. I try to scream, but no sound comes out. I can’t see either. They bite, climb all over my body, and wander through my clothes and hair. There must be hundreds, even thousands. I try to breath in and out slowly. I attempt to calm myself down, but it’s a challenge. The more I seem to relax, the more spiders that vanish. In a while, all the spiders have disappeared and I can open my eyes again.

All around me there seem to be flowers, trees, and grass growing through the ground that’s starting to create a scene. The field in the famous movie of “The Sound of Music” starts to surface. I watch as Julie Andrews and the children have a picnic and sing. Hailey is among the children, smiling and singing. I sit on the grass with my legs folded and decide to watch the group sing and enjoy themselves.

When the actors start to go on to the next scene, Hailey stays sitting and looks over at me. She doesn’t seem to have any emotion. It looks like she’s staring through me. Then she just disappears, almost fading into the air.

“Not this again,” I mumble to myself.

I sprint to where Hailey was sitting. I repeatedly scream her name. I know she is gone somewhere, but at this point, I’m only reassuring myself. My little string of hope is slowly weaning down. I just want to go home. I want to grab my sister and leave this television world, or wherever we are. I hate it. Why did this have to happen to us?

As tears avalanche down my face and I hold my knees to my chest, I remember the old times. Before nothing mattered and you could just enjoy life. You didn’t have to live scared and in fear.

Some memories have always stuck out more than others. Some good and some bad. I always have loved the quote, “You can lose what you cling to.” Buddha said it once. People tend to cling to what they want or choose to. No one wants to remember the bad moments or times of crisis, and they don’t want to admit that those times lurk in the back of their minds, haunting them forever.

I remember one evening when my mother stormed out of the house. Her boyfriend didn’t exist in our lives yet, so she left me all alone. I never found out where she went, but I know it wasn’t a good place. Anyways, she had gotten fed up with not having enough money and that we were getting evicted soon if she didn’t pay up somehow. I can clearly remember her yelling (but not exactly what she was saying) and watched her slam the front door shut. The force of the door shook our whole trailer. I recall staying curled up under the kitchen table; I was trembling and crying. I cried myself fell asleep how I was sitting, hoping my mother would come back and tell me it’s okay. I always have known it isn’t okay, but I have to hope that someday I will escape this state and make something of myself. I only have to find my sister first.

I stay until the next scene of the movie and “jump” to the next channel. I keep going from channel to channel until I make my way to the news channel. My plan is to go to the most relative subject to my sister’s “mystery” and look for any clues on how to find her, then leave this nightmare of a place.

I don’t understand why people have to follow a routine every day of their lives. You have to wake up, get ready, and work, then follow the same thing the next day and the next. Everything appears to be the same, but it really isn’t. I was never a person for routines and following strict orders. I like to do things in my own order or way. Also, I’ve always apprehended what people do and say in different ways than others do. It has also has caused me to get reprimanded frequently.

I walk through the woods in a background of a scene. Music gently plays in the background, “Choose your last words, This is the last time, Cause you and I, We were born to die.” As I saunter down the dirt path, I start to hear voices.

“Stop trying to leave!”

“You can’t do that!”

“You’re wrong!”

These voices start to become stronger the faster I run down the path. “Get away from me!” I scream and clamp my hands over my ears.

“Stop that!”

“You never do anything right!”

“Why can’t you just do it right like the others!”

Horrors of being wrong and “screwing up” haunt me to everyday, and even in my dreams. I am constantly being yelled at, and I hate it; I dread it; I can’t take it anymore!

“STOP!” I trip over a root of a tree and drop onto the ground. I pull my knees to my chest and press my hands into my ears. “Stop yelling at me for once!” I despise the sound and feeling of being brought down brings me. It’s making me feel as if I’m crumbling down piece by piece, and now I’m withering away.

Abruptly, all of the noise stops. The woods are silent; no music, no noises from the animals, and best of all: no more voices. I shakily pull myself to my feet and stand with my back against a tree. I fan around my surroundings and see nothing, but the trees and the dirt path. I decide to follow it until it leads me to nowhere.

The “nowhere” that I currently face strikes to be a wall. I toss a stick towards it, and it goes right through with a “pop” noise. I slowly stick my foot through. I almost get half of my body through; I can feel myself getting closer, but I get stuck between the “barrier” of the two channels.

***

“Hailey O’ Henry has now been missing for six days. No sightings have been reported. She is short, about six years of age, with curly blonde hair and green eyes,” the news anchor repeats. I see the small picture of my sister and grab on to it. As I hold on, clenching on to her curly hair, she starts to move. She winces and I pull until we start to go through the screen the same way we came into this world.

We fall back into the old store. A news anchor repeats again, “Hailey O’ Henry has now been missing for six days. No sightings have been reported. She is short, about six years of age, with curly blonde hair and green eyes.” Hailey and I sit in front of a television set from the 1950’s, trying to catch our breath.

“Hailey?”

She looks up at me.

“Don’t leave me again, okay?”


End file.
